[This review appeared in the Journal of Social,
Political and Economic Studies, Spring 2001.]

Book
Reviews

Knights of
the Brush:

The Hudson
River School and the Moral Landscape

James F. Cooper

Hudson Hills Press, 1999

Readers of this journal will recall the article entitled An Artistic
Renaissance? in the summer 1999 issue that told of the American Arts
Quarterly's championing of a potential aesthetic renewal in the United
States. The goal of the Newington-Cropsey Foundation, publisher of the
Quarterly, has been to bring sublimity and beauty to the arts, supplanting what
it sees as a studied ugliness in postmodernist art. One of the early-American
schools of art that is often featured within the Quarterly is the Hudson River
School of Romantic painters that towered over American painting between 1830 and
1860. Although the Quarterly contains articles by a number of authors about many
different artists and their work, the intellectual core of the Quarterly's
efforts comes from two men: James F. Cooper, the editor, and Frederick Turner,
who works with the magazine and serves on the editorial advisory board.

Now the Quarterly is in effect supplemented by a book of high-quality artistic
reproductions and aesthetic, historical commentary. James F. Cooper is
Knights of the Brush's primary author, providing the text that
accompanies the illustrations and that explains the characteristics of the
Hudson River School and its place in American history. Frederick Turner adds a
second to Cooper's views with a brief Foreword. Fifty-six colorplate
reproductions of the leading paintings by such artists as Thomas Cole, Jasper F.
Cropsey, Frederic Edwin Church, Asher Brown Durand, and others, combine with the
text to make this book rank high among the many beautiful and informative art
books available.

The early nineteenth century American wilderness, suffused with light that is
made even more striking by its contrast with deep shadow, provides the
paintings' subject. The scenes often contain Protestant Christian imagery,
reflecting the artists' central purpose of presenting nature as a manifestation
of God's presence. The values informing their work? - virtue, chivalry,
spirituality, beauty, order - to which we might add Plato's philosophic Realism,
as is evident when reference is made to "timeless archetypal forms."

Accordingly, Cooper and Turner see the Hudson River School as a champion of
artistic standards that have been repudiated by the postmodernist school, which
for several years has held sway within academic and institutional art. They tell
us how art today has been politicized and condemns the past as Eurocentric,
heterosexual, racist, hierarchical, and an instrument of class and racial
oppression. The radical relativism of Foucault and Derrida denies the value of
standards, representational art, and archetypes.

To
present this contrast and to point, then, to a possible renewal of Western
artistic commitment to beauty, Knights of the Brush contains three
sections: "Paradise Found," about the Hudson River School itself; "Paradise
Lost," about the slide into secularism and cultural alienation; and "Paradise
Regained," about the signs of incipient renewal.

There is more that could be told here about the paintings and artists
themselves, but the reader is best left to experience those things personally,
since the paintings speak more eloquently than words can describe.

In
some important ways, this reviewer would suggest, however, a different analysis
of recent art history than the text provides:

It
is a mistake, induced by focusing exclusively on art as it is recognized by an
"art establishment," to believe that contemporary American art repudiates the
beauty-focused art of the past. This repudiation comes from an institutionally
dominant art, but there is a vast corpus of art, much of it excellent, being
produced by thousands of artists throughout the country that has always
continued to be representational and "traditional." The renaissance for which
the Newington-Cropsey foundation hopes has, in effect, always been there, if
only the non-establishment art were given full recognition.

Perhaps this reviewer's main conceptual criticism of the text's analysis is that
it is only partly correct in ascribing the 20th century's move into alienated
art to the rise of secularism. It is indisputable, of course, that secularism
has taken the West away from the Hudson River School's vision that "God is
immanent in nature." But the Enlightenment and secularism need not have given
rise to alienated art, one that is actually (as one Dadaist described it)
"anti-art."

It
is important to understand the central feature of what we know as "the world
Left" as it came into being in the early 19th century. Perhaps the best
definition of "the Left" is that it has for almost two centuries been a movement
headed by a vastly influential literary-artistic subculture that has fashioned
its thinking to appeal to the many allies it has sought, with varying degrees of
success, to enlist from disaffected or unassimilated groups. Marx courted the
"proletariat," but that was just one of many hoped-for sources of support. The
most characteristic feature of the alliance has been its alienation against
virtually all aspects of 19th and 20th century mainstream Western society.

This combination of alienation and alliance-with-disaffected-groups produced an
ideology (which may be spoken of in the singular even though it has experienced
many intramural disputes) that, as one of its principal weapons, has included a
repudiation of the value-system embraced by the mainstream society - and this
has included a repudiation oof what the subculture has seen as "bourgeois" art.
If we understand this dynamic, we see that it has been the Left, not secularism
or the Enlightenment per se, that has so long been the inveterate enemy
of sublime or even emotionally satisfying art. It is possible to be secular
without being alienated.

To
this, of course, a caveat must be added. It is that the Left has in quite a
serious way been mistaken in its identification of representational and
beauty-oriented art with the mainstream modern commercial and middle class
culture; it is true that the average person prefers that sort of art, but such
art was revered long before the rise of such a society (and, seen historically,
has largely been a product of aristocracy). In its alienation, the Left has
thrown out the Athenians with the Philistines.

This criticism of Cooper's analysis is the same as this reviewer has made
previously of the historical perspective of Russell Kirk, who in common with
Richard Weaver and others saw modern secularism as the central force for
cultural destruction. Cooper's text seems very much a reflection of Kirk. The
criticism is included here not to diminish Knights of the Brush, but
intellectually to give its message the attention it deserves.